Fiction: Lesson Plans

In this lesson students will look behind the story at the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that help account for the great contrasts and contradictions that Esperanza experiences when she moves to California. The lesson also invites students to contemplate some of the changes Esperanza undergoes as she grows from a pampered child into a resourceful and responsible young woman.

In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane presents war through the eyes —and thoughts —of one soldier. The narrative’s altered point of view and stylistic innovations enable a heightened sense of realism while setting the work apart from war stories written essentially as tributes or propaganda.

The Red Badge of Courage’s success reflects the birth of a modern sensibility; today we feel something is true when it looks like the sort of thing we see in newspapers or on television news.

Revised version, updated 2/3/06. This unit explores elements of wonder, distortion, fantasy, and whimsy in Lewis Carroll's adaptation for younger readers of his beloved classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Students will become familiar with fables and trickster tales from different cultural traditions and will see how stories change when transferred orally between generations and cultures.

This unit explores elements of wonder, distortion, fantasy, and whimsy in Lewis Carroll's adaptation for younger readers of his beloved classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Curriculum unit overview. In this three-part curriculum unit, students examine structure and characterization in several short stories and consider the significance of humor through a study of several American writers.

Lesson 1: Mark Twain and American Humor
Lesson 2: “Old Southwest” Humorists and George Washington Harris
Lesson 3: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Literary Humor

Through studying Beatrix Potter's stories and illustrations from the early 1900s and learning about her childhood in Victorian England, students can compare/contrast these with their own world to understand why Potter wrote such simple stories and why she wrote about animals rather than people.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wall-paper" was written during this time of great change. This lesson plan, the first part of a two-part lesson, helps to set the historical, social, cultural, and economic context of Gilman's story.

Students explore Lewis Carroll’s imaginative visions of childhood, captured in his photography and in the words and art of his Alice in Wonderland stories. Students also compare and contrast Carroll’s Victorian view of childhood to that of Romantic poet and printer William Blake.

This lesson introduces students to Achebe's first novel and to his views on the role of the writer in his or her society.

Through close reading and textual analysis of Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel about the British colonization of Nigeria, students learn how oral, linguistic, and literary strategies are used to present one’s own story and history through literature.

This lesson plan compares the main characteristics of the heroine in several versions of the Cinderella tale to help students understand connections between a story’s main character and the plot’s outcome.

This lesson plan compares the plot and setting characteristics of several versions of the Cinderella tale to teach students about universal and culturally specific literary elements.

Heavily influenced by social and scientific theories, including those of Darwin, writers of naturalism described—usually from a detached or journalistic perspective—the influence of society and surroundings on the development of the individual. In the following lesson plan, students will learn the key characteristics that comprise American literary naturalism as they explore London's "To Build a Fire" and Crane's "The Open Boat."

By studying Mark Twain's novel, Huckleberry Finn, and its critics with a focus on cultural context, students will develop essential analytical tools for navigating this text and for exploring controversies that surround this quintessential American novel.

By rendering aspects of Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" into carefully considered graphical forms, students learn to appreciate elements of characterization, setting, and plot in a manner that engages them actively in the production of meaning.

Trace the elements of myth and history in the world of the Round Table.
Date Revised: 06/22/06

The following lesson introduces children to folk tales through a literary approach that emphasizes genre categories and definitions. In this unit, students will become familiar with fables and trickster tales from different cultural traditions and will see how stories change when transferred orally between generations and cultures.

In this lesson plan, students read and learn to understand fairy tales in order to recognize their universal literary structures and themes. They compare similar fairy tales from different cultural and geographic regions of the world to see over-arching plots featururing conflicts between good and evil and imagery and motifs that are repeated across many cultures and time periods.

Curriculum Unit overview. William Faulkner’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, is a fascinating exploration of the many voices found in a Southern family and community. The following lesson examines the novel’s use of multiple voices in its narrative.

Lesson 1: Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: Images of Faulkner and the South
Lesson 2: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Family Voices In As I Lay Dying
Lesson 3: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Crossing the River
Lesson 4: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Burying Addie's Voice
Lesson 5: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Concluding the Novel

Known as both a Southern and a Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) wrote stories that are hard to forget. In this lesson, students will explore these dichotomies—and challenge them—while closely reading and analyzing "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Learn how writer Zora Neale Hurston incorporated and transformed black folklife in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By exploring Hurston’s own life history and collection methods, listening to her WPA recordings of folksongs and folktales, and comparing transcribed folk narrative texts with the plot and themes of the novel, students will learn about the crucial role of oral folklore in Hurston’s written work.

The study of humans and animals in cooperation and conflict within folktales from different cultures lends itself to a simple lesson on ecology and endangered species to help students can make connections between the relationships between human beings and animals in folklore and the relationship between people and the environment in our world.

This lesson focuses on the works of Hans Christian Andersen and helps students understand the fairy tale genre through exploration and analysis of themes, plots, and characterizations in The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and other tales.

Compare the storyteller?s voice with that of the writer who was a contemporary of Whitman and Douglass.

Through examining several examples of tales from around the world that focus on the relationship between people and animals, students will learn about humans living in cooperation with the land and sea and with the beasts that inhabit them. This lesson plan addresses various helpful animal tale types, such as animal nurses who rear great heroes after they have been abandoned as infants, and beasts that lend supernatural aid to humans.

Through their interpretation of primary documents that reflect Victorian ideals, students can learn the cultural expectations for and limitations placed on Victorian women and then contemplate the writer Charlotte Brontë's position in that context. Then, through an examination of the opening chapters of Jane Eyre, students will evaluate Jane's status as an unconventional Victorian heroine.

As a man and his animal companion take a less-traveled path to their Yukon camp, they step into a tale of wilderness survival and dire circumstances in this excellent example of American literary naturalism by Jack London.

Students practice strategies of "close reading" in order to understand Edith Wharton's gripping tragedy about an unhappy marriage set against the stark backdrop of rural New England.

Students learn about the social and historical context of Willa Cather’s My Antonia and work in groups to explore Cather's commentary on fortitude, hard work, faithfulness, and other values that we associate with pioneer life

Students study select court transcripts and other primary source material from the second Scottsboro Boys Trial of 1933, a continuation of the first trial in which two young white women wrongfully accused nine African-American youths of rape.

This lesson plan asks students to read To Kill A Mockingbird carefully with an eye for all instances and manifestations of courage, but particularly those of moral courage.

The harrowing adventure of four men fighting for survival after a shipwreck is chronicled by Stephen Crane in "The Open Boat." Students learn about narration, point of view, and man's relationship to nature in this classic example of American literary naturalism.

Arthur, Camelot, Gawain, a challenge, a perilous journey, a beheading, an enchantment, and a shape-shifter are the ingredients of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For the modern reader, Sir Gawain's tale is riveting even without understanding its symmetry or cultural and historical context. Viewed through the lens of the medieval thinker, reading this Arthurian tale becomes a rich, multi-layered experience.

In this lesson, students will discover how historical events gradually merged with fantasy to create the colorful tales we enjoy today. This Lesson Plan revised: 12/30/2005

Examine the relationship between science and the supernatural in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the “horror stories” of Hawthorne and Poe.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "class struggle" is portrayed as an intensely personal affair, as much a tension within the mind of a single character as a conflict between characters. Students' own experience of the struggle to belong can provide a starting point for an exploration of the mixed emotions--jealousy, admiration, desire, resentment--that characterize main character Nick Caraway's attitude towards the "secret society" of wealthy Easterners. Other lesson activities also include a close study of the text and an examination of Fitzgerald's letters and other statements.

Students explore the artistry that helped make Washington Irving our nation's first literary master and ponder the mystery that now haunts every Halloween--What happened to Ichabod Crane?

Many children are familiar with Snow White's evil stepmother and her poisonous apple, Cinderella's fairy godmother, and the witch in the gingerbread house waiting to eat Hansel and Gretel for dinner. But have they met Baba Yaga, the old crone who is both wise and cruel, who lives in a house standing on chicken legs, and whose servants bring with them the day, sunset and the night? Baba Yaga, the iconic witch of Slavic fairy tales, is one of the characters students will meet in this journey through Russian fairy tales.

Students explore the cultural significance of masks, discuss the use of masks in stories, and then investigate the role masks play in ceremonies and on special occasions in various African cultures.

This lesson will explore images of magical creatures from around the world. After discussing the special attributes of such creatures, students will view images of specific mythological creatures from two cultures and listen to stories about them.

Curriculum unit overview. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury is often referred to as William Faulkner's first work of genius. Faulkner's style is characterized by frequent time shifts, narrator shifts, unconventional punctuation and sentence structure, as well as a stream-of-consciousness technique that reveals the inner thoughts of characters to the reader. This curriculum unit will examine narrative structure and time, narrative voice/point of view, and symbolism throughout The Sound and the Fury.

Lesson 1: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: Benjy's Sense of Time and Narrative Voice
Lesson 2: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: Narrating Quentin's Mental Breakdown
Lesson 3: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: Narration, Voice, and the Compson Family's New System
Lesson 4: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: April Eighth, 1928: Narrating from an 'Ordered Place'?